Most of you would have come here pondering about which web hosting company to sign up with – FatCow and DreamHost Web Hosting. Both offer impressive specifications of their plans.

All looks almost equal – even in the clean energy area, both web hosting companies try to outdo each other with FatCow claiming to use Wind Energy to power its servers, and DreamHost being carbon neutral.

Clearly both companies are overselling. It’s a common marketing strategy adopted by the web hosting industry to satisfy the high and low resource clients.

This article concentrates on some of the differences you don’t see on the surface – that’s till you sign up onto their plans and part with your money and time.

Let’s start off with a quick comparison chart that doesn’t show much differences:

FatCow

Dreamhost

Disk Space

Unlimited*

Unlimited*

Bandwidth

Unlimited*

Unlimited*

POP Mailboxes

Unlimited*

Unlimited*

Domain Name

Free

Free

One-click Installs

Yes

Yes

PHP

Yes

Yes

MySQL

Unlimited

Unlimited

Subversion / CVS

No

Yes

Free Domain

Yes

Yes

SSL Secure Server

Yes

No

FTP

Yes

Yes

24×7 Customer Support

Phone, Email & Live Chat

Phone, Email & Live Chat

Money-Back Guarantee

30 days

97 days

Uptime Guarantee

None stated

100% SLA

Frontpage Extensions

Yes

No

Environment Care

Wind Energy

Carbon Neutral

Cost

$7.3/mth

$8.95/mth

* Though ‘Unlimited’, the meaning is not literal. Their true meanings are explained for Dreamhost Hereand for FatCow here which basically means – If you use too much resources, you’re outta here. DreamHost offers an alternate VPS service for CPU hogging clients though.

The differences seem minimal between them. So how do you make a wise choice?

The answer is to compare their control panels. Neither of them use cPanel, the industry’s mostly used control panel to configure your website. Instead, here are two screen shots side by side to compare the direct differences of their control panel.

FatCow

DreamHost

The difference is apparent. Dreamhost offers much more customization for the dollar. Comparing to Fat Cow’s web hosting control panel, Dreamhost’s control panel option far surpasses that of FatCow’s.